How Nvidia Is Leaving Competitors In The Dust
Contributor since 2014 / 2040 Followers
Summary:
- Nvidia Corporation continues to grow rapidly as competitors struggle to gain a foothold in AI accelerators.
- Nvidia’s aggressive technological progress and capacity expansion have made it very difficult for others to compete.
- Consequently, I expect Nvidia to see strong growth through the rest of 2024 and 2025.
- Overall, I maintain a strong buy rating for Nvidia stock.
BlackJack3D
Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported fiscal Q1 2025 earnings on Wednesday, May 22. The company posted a strong beat yet again, and guided continued growth for the current quarter (fiscal Q2, 2025). On the earnings call, management also provided updates pertaining to its competitive positioning for the next few quarters.
Combined with comments we have heard from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel (INTC) this earnings season, I am now convinced that Nvidia will manage to stay well ahead of the competition in the data center AI accelerator market for quite some time. Nvidia continues to see increasing demand for its AI chips, while AMD and Intel struggle to grow their backlogs even amidst an enormous boom. I think there are good reasons for this divergence in performance, and they have to do with Nvidia’s very aggressive strategy to keep competition at bay. In this article, I take a closer look at this strategy and explain why I believe it is proving successful.
Overall, I maintain a Strong Buy rating for Nvidia stock.
The Competitive Landscape
Over the last year, there have been various concerns about Nvidia’s competitive moat in data center GPUs and the company’s ability to stave off competition from the other major chipmakers (especially AMD, and to some extent Intel). I have also written about this topic previously.
The last few months have yielded further clarity on the subject of competitiveness. Specifically, both AMD and Intel have struggled to win orders for their MI300 and Gaudi 3 accelerators, respectively. As I discussed in detail in a recent article, AMD had reported that the MI300 backlog was $2 billion in December and $3.5 billion in January. However, their update at the start of May showed only a $500 million increase in the MI300 backlog to $4 billion. Intel also expects only $500 million in revenue for Gaudi 3 accelerators in 2024.
Meanwhile, Nvidia continues to grow at a strong clip. Not only have data center sales continue to grow by several billion dollars each quarter, Nvidia even reported that “demand for [current-generation] Hopper [accelerators] during the quarter continues to increase.” This is in stark contrast to the tepid demand outlooks from competitors.
In addition, (i) Nvidia’s Grace Hopper super chips (CPU + GPU) are now “shipping in volume”; (ii) refreshed H200 accelerators start shipping in Q2; and (iii) next-generation Blackwell are in full production and management expects “a lot of Blackwell revenue this year.” AMD and Intel are already struggling to make inroads against the H100, so Nvidia’s aggressive roadmap for the remainder of this year and next bodes well for Nvidia’s competitive position.
Nvidia is also accelerating its cadence of chip launches, and is looking to move from a two-year update cycle to a one-year cycle.
Nvidia’s Relentless Technological Progress
It seems that instead of ceding market share or competing aggressively on price, Nvidia’s primary strategy for addressing competition from other chipmakers is to relentlessly advance its technology. It makes sense why this would be the preferred approach for Nvidia — although difficult to pull off, it can help preserve both market share and profit margins.
As I discussed in a recent AMD article, the MI300X looked quite competitive (hardware-wise) when it launched in Q4 2023. MI300X chips benchmarked similarly to the H100 in training and better in inference. However, MI300 chips take seven months to manufacture and AMD won’t have much supply until most likely Q4 2024. This means that the MI300 won’t just be going up against the H100. By the time there is decent supply available, the MI300 will be going up against both the refreshed H200 and also the next-generation B100 (and then B200 next year). The comparison is likely to become much less favorable for AMD, especially given the strong expected improvements in power efficiency and total cost of ownership for Blackwell chips.
Intel lags even further behind AMD in AI accelerators, so their competitive position is even worse.
Moreover, Nvidia continues to strengthen its AI chip offerings beyond data center GPUs as well. Nvidia’s Jetson chips for robotics seem to be taking off in various use cases. Nvidia management also reported that its automotive chips are meeting with good success among customers, and that the next-generation Thor chips (due to launch next year) have won a number of design wins with auto manufacturers. Although Intel does have significant inroads into automotive compute with its stake in Mobileye Global (MBLY), AMD does not — and neither is as well-positioned in robotics.
Finally, of course, Nvidia continues to rapidly strengthen its already dominant position in AI software. During the GTC Keynote in March, Nvidia showcased an impressive slew of new and updated AI software including pre-trained models that customers can fine tune for their specific needs, along with specialized offerings for various use cases like robotics, simulation, and forecasting.
With all these updates to Nvidia’s software portfolio, it seems fair to say that on the software front, the other chipmakers are nowhere close to where Nvidia is today. For instance, even if AMD were to succeed in turning ROCm into a viable competitor to CUDA (already a very difficult task), that would still leave their software offerings far behind Nvidia’s in areas like simulation, robotics, automotive, etc.
Given all this progress in both hardware and software, Nvidia continues to be in an excellent position against other major chipmakers. The continuing strong growth from Nvidia, paired with the tepid AI outlooks from AMD and Intel, provides further evidence that Nvidia’s strategy of relentless technological progress is working very well to stave off the competition.
The Best Ability Is Availability
One factor that had created an opening for competitors in the data center GPU space over the last year was the low availability of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs and the associated long lead times for procuring them. It made sense for customers to look elsewhere for GPUs under these conditions. However, H100 lead times have reportedly dropped from about a year to only 2–3 months. As such, it would seem that customers looking to buy many GPUs today could receive delivery of H100s sooner than they could receive delivery of AMD’s MI300s (and possibly Intel’s Gaudi 3). Hence, there is now one less reason for customers to look beyond Nvidia.
H200 and B100 accelerators should be ramping quickly over the rest of the year, and although they are likely to see supply constraints and longer lead times this year, their availability (even in limited amounts) should further strengthen the case for customers to choose Nvidia over the alternatives.
As a result, I expect that Nvidia’s great work in terms of expanding its capacity over the last few quarters is likely to yield significant benefits in terms of staving off competitors both this year and next year.
Conclusion
When I last covered Nvidia stock in February, I had assigned an end-of-year price target of $930, but noted that I saw significant upside beyond $1,000. This was based on an expectation of $35 billion revenue, 50% net profit margin, and $28 run-rate EPS in the last quarter of this year.
In Q1, Nvidia reported $26 billion revenue versus my expectation of $24 billion, and is guiding $28 billion for Q2. EPS also came in at a $24 run-rate versus my expectation of $22. Given the ongoing ramps for H200 and B100, I would say that Nvidia is solidly on track to meet (and perhaps to exceed) both my $35 billion revenue expectation and my $28 run-rate EPS expectation for the end of the year. Nvidia also seems to be on track to meet or exceed my net profit margin expectation — I had modeled a decline of 6 percentage points compared to fiscal Q4 2024, but Nvidia seems to be guiding a gross margin decline of about 3-5 percentage points for the remainder of the year.
Given Nvidia’s strong execution compared to my expectations, along with the significant blows that Nvidia seems to have dealt to the competition, I would say that Nvidia’s current price (around $1040) makes sense and is well-deserved. I do think that Nvidia is about fairly valued relative to my expectations for the end of this year, so I wonder if the stock price may stall for a little bit. But we are almost in June, so it is not a significant knock on Nvidia that the stock price is already where I expected to be around the end of the year. Moreover, given how effectively Nvidia seems to be shaking off its competitors, I now feel quite confident that the company will see strong top and bottom-line growth in 2025, and that a significantly higher share price will be warranted exiting next year. As such, overall, Nvidia remains a strong buy for me, and I continue to expect the stock to generate excess returns going forward.
When I initiated Nvidia as a strong buy a year ago, I had argued that investors should be patient and allow Nvidia to keep growing its top and bottom lines. I had reiterated this view in November. Today, I still think it makes sense for investors to maintain a tight grip on their Nvidia holdings and allow the company to keep growing.
As discussed, conditions are very favorable for continued strong Nvidia Corporation growth both this year and next (and perhaps beyond as well). Nvidia’s leadership position in AI is quite unique, and Nvidia continues to be a near-monopoly with excellent technology, execution, and leadership. As such, in my opinion, there is no very compelling reason to jump ship today.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of NVDA either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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